Blogs are lightweight Web publications that typically
display new stories ("posts") in reverse chronological order (that
is, newest first). That's it. Everything else is variations on that
simple theme, although the variations can be extreme.

What's RSS and why should I care?

Really Simple Syndication. There are other spelled-out
versions. If you hear of "Atom," it's like RSS but different.

You should care because RSS turns blogs and other sites into
"push" mechanisms--called "feeds." Instead of visiting each
site every so often to see what's new, new items from each site are pushed
somewhere so that you can check lots of sites at once. That's called aggregation,
and although it's not the only way to use RSS by any means, it's probably the
most common.

Bloglines is the
most widely-used aggregator, although it's also a blog hosting service and blog
search engine. I'll talk a little about how I use Bloglines. You can get a feed
from almost any blog (there are exceptions) and from thousands of other
places--weather sites, stock-tracking sites, what have you. A growing number of
libraries have RSS feeds for their new book lists or program announcements.

Aren't blogs just online diaries?

Maybe in the beginning, and many still are--perhaps most, if
you define "diary" broadly enough. Blogs these days can be almost
anything that's suited to the reverse-chronological style--and that covers a
lot of ground. Pundits run blogs. So do writers, newspapers, companies,
charities, groups of people with a common interest…

How many blogs are there?

Nobody knows for sure, but it's definitely in the tens of
millions. By one estimate, at least a hundred million blogs have been created.

Technorati (one of
several blog indexing and tracking services) was tracking 27.2 million blogs as
of February 6, 2006, (28.4 million as of February 21) and says the number of
blogs tracked doubles about every 5.5 months. But fewer than half of those
blogs have new posts after the first three months (13.7 million), and only
about 10% (2.7 million) are being updated at least once a week. (These figures
come from this blog
posting.)

Pubsub (another blog
indexing and tracking service) tracked 24,350,105 total sources
including 11,618,966 active sources as of February 21.

So let's say there are around 11 to 15 million
"active" blogs.

Millions of blogs are phonies--spam blogs created in efforts
to manipulate search engine rankings. Millions more are one-shots, created in blogging
classes and the like, where one post went up--and usually no more than a few
more before the blogger lost interest. It only takes a couple of minutes to
start a blog, so it's not surprising there are so many abandoned ones.

Nonetheless, blogging is active. Bloglines indexed 1,179,230,421 stories
as of February 21. Technorati tracks about 1.2 million new posts each day.

Notes on some blogging variations and numbers

Most blogs have single authors. Some have a group of
contributors. I don't know of any that have open contributions, but I haven't
looked.

Most blogs consist of relatively brief stories added
reasonably frequently, with most stories including one or more links to other
websites. But that statement is almost meaningless…and RSS makes it even more
meaningless. When I did a modest investigation of the biblioblogosphere
last summer--that is, blogs created by library people-- the median length of
posts over a three-month period was just 188 words, but four blogs averaged
more than 400 words per post (excluding one special case), including my own. One new library blogger, Elyssa Kroski
at Infotangle, appears to
be posting one full-fledged article (endnotes and all) per month, so far
averaging 3,000 words per post.

Most blogs are public, but that's not mandatory. LiveJournal
supports a form of blogging with restricted access if users choose, and there's
reason to believe that a growing number of intranets--internal networks within
companies and associations--use blogs. Still, all estimates of blog numbers are
for public blogs.

Most blogs allow comments, and the comments can add
enormously to the blogs. Very few widely-read blogs allow uncontrolled comments
because of "spamment"--spam comments, submitted to manipulate search
engine results. Some bloggers moderate all comments (approving them before they
appear). Many moderate first-time comments and those containing X number of
links (or containing certain trigger words). Many use "capcha"
routines [I'll describe]. Most require legitimate email addresses and forbid
anonymous comments. Quite a few blogs just don't allow comments any more.

Most blogs are done for the fun of it, to make points, or to
communicate--but some are sponsored, some make money through ads, and some have
paid bloggers.

Blogs can be done using a free blog hosting/software service
such as Blogger (Blogspot) or Bloglines, on websites using free blogging
software such as WordPress, or on websites using paid software. A few bloggers
"roll their own," coding their own sites, but that's unusual.

Most blogs automatically create archives of posts that roll
off the home page (typically a limit of 10 posts), organizing archives into
months that appear on a sidebar. There may also be a calendar for each month
showing days on which posts appeared. Many blogs have categories of posts as a
sidebar. Many allow searching of all the posts. Many use tagging.

Some blogs have "blogrolls"--links to other blogs
that the blogger likes. A recent variation on that theme is to link to a public
BlogLines subscription list; for example, "blogs I read" is one
of the "Places" in a sidebar on my blog. Approach that particular
list with care--it's very long, because I track a lot of the biblioblogosphere
for my own writing.

A few blogs have huge audiences and thousands of links from
other blogs. Millions of blogs have tiny audiences and no links from other
blogs. What David Sifry calls "the magic middle" (in this post) may
represent the heart of active blogging: 155,000 blogs with links from 20 to
1,000 other blogs. I fall into that middle category. So does hangingtogether, RLG's closest thing to
an "official" blog. So do pretty much all of the better-known blogs
in the library field, although a number of fairly well-known blogs may have
links from fewer than 20 blogs. Note that link counts in web search
engines, using the link: syntax, may or may not be meaningful…

Most of us don't know how many readers we have; it's hard to
tell. I know I have 144 subscribers on Bloglines, but have no idea how many
total indirect (RSS) readers I have. Directly, I averaged around 800 sessions
per day in the first 20 days of February, with over 3,000 different visitors
(that is, IP addresses), and more than 4,000 unique IP addresses in January.
That surprises me, frankly. I'd still say I have "a few hundred"
readers (I've used 4x the Bloglines subscriber count as a crude estimate), but it's
clear that several thousand people have seen at least one post. (That's not
unusual. My e-journal, Cites &
Insights, appears to have 3,000 to 6,000 direct readers per issue, maybe up
to 9,000 for certain hot topics, but it's been visited by more than 87,000
unique IP addresses over the past three years.)

What about the biblioblogosphere?

I have no idea how many blogs fall into this category. My
best guess is in the low to medium thousands, with something over a thousand that
are currently active (which I'd define as having at least one post a quarter).

There are three general subcategories: Blogs produced by
libraries for library purposes, blogs produced by individual "library
people," and blogs produced by groups of library people and library
organizations.

Redwood City Public Library has one of the oldest library blogs.
There are hundreds of others by now. An ongoing directory at blogwithoutalibrary
currently shows 164 blogs at public libraries, 162 at academic libraries,
25 at school libraries, 20 used by libraries for internal purposes (but
available on the web), 61 from special libraries and associations, and 15 for
specific academic library initiatives--that's nearly 450 in all, and the
directory is almost certainly incomplete. Note that this directory includes
some of the blogs I'd class under the "groups of people and
organizations" category.

Most library-related blogs probably fall into the middle
category, produced by single individuals, although a growing number, including
RLG's hangingtogether and OCLC's It's all good, fall into the third.

If I have time, I'll offer a few offhand notes about why
library people and groups blog--and about fame, prominence, and influence
within the field.

Thanks to the It's all good folks, there have been two
"blogger salons" in OCLC suites, one at the 2005 ALA Annual
Conference, one last month at ALA Midwinter. Perhaps 40 bloggers got together
last summer; I'd say it was 60 or 70 this time around. I've probably interacted
with at least 100 to 150 library bloggers via email or comments--and meeting
them in person has almost always been a pleasure.

How do you find library blogs? There are several directories,
including the library
blogs directory noted above. Unfortunately, the two
biggest (Open Directory
and Libdex) are out of date--they include lots of dead blogs and lack some of
the more interesting newer ones. Still, they're good starting points. I would
highly recommend LISFeeds, which is not
only a list of blogs but also its own "aggregator" of sorts--but it's
been broken for a while, and I don't know when it will return. I've already
linked to the blogs I read, but that isn't to say I recommend them all.

Right now, the most up to date and comprehensive single
directory is probably the weblogs
page at LISWiki (Merrilee plans another brown bag about wikis!). It shows
380 individual and group blogs (if I counted right) plus long lists of academic
blogs and relatively short lists of non-English-language blogs. I didn't know
about this page until yesterday (February 22); another blogger mentioned it in
a comment on the stub post that links to what was then the first draft of these
notes. That's just a little example of the ways bloggers help one another to
educate us all.

There are really only a few very well known library
blogs, if you don't include LISNews (I
don't, because it's way too complicated to be called a blog--but it's certainly
worth visiting, and includes several dozen "journals" or sub-blogs).
All of the very well-known library blogs are certainly worth reading, although
they're not necessarily the most interesting ones around. For the record, the
biggies are Jenny Levine's The
Shifted Librarian, Steven M. Cohen's Library
Stuff, Tara Calishain's Research
Buzz, and Jessamyn West's librarian.net.
If you want a longer list of 232 library-related blogs in descending order of
"reach" as of last summer, you'll find a spreadsheet with links here--but note that some
links may have died since the spreadsheet was prepared.

One final note: Bloggers are as given to whimsy as anyone,
including library bloggers, and the form lends itself to occasional bursts of
whimsy. With that note, I recommend this site--when
you're at a computer with speakers or with headphones attached!

That's it for the written supplement…provided mostly so that you
can follow links. Now, over to Merrilee…